Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 131

And on a more cheerful---and interactive--note

Storm Reyes talks today on StoryCorps about growing up as the hungry daughter of migrant workers, herself working full-time from age eight. She could never have any books; books were too heavy for a family constantly on the move to lug around. Then when she was twelve, the bookmobile came to the fields. . .

"I learned to fight with a knife long before I learned how to ride a bicycle"

when I saw this big vehicle on the side of the road, and it was filled with books, I immediately stepped back. F...

Update on Irom Sharmila

Yesterday Irom Sharmila appeared in court in Delhi to answer a charge of attempted suicide in Delhi in 2006--actually just a continuation of her hunger strike in protest of the Armed Forces Special Protection Act, which gives the military impunity in Sharmila's home province of Manipur.

Standing before the court with a pipe in her nose - through which she has been force-fed since November, 2000 - Sharmila told the court she would eat her first bite in over a decade right there and then if the...

The results of the Amazon warehouse petition

Sometime ago I started a petition asking Amazon to reform its warehouse conditions. It was a very limited petition, but having those signatures behind me gave force to my letter to the investor relations department. (I'm not an investor in Amazon, but IR people are very sensitive to the company's image, and they report to the board, so they were my contact point with the board.)

The letter they sent back basically asserts that their current practices are fine--better than many. Of course, bett...

A blog about messages in bottles

With the help of Google Alerts, I keep my eye open for stories about messages in bottles, and when I find interesting ones, I add them, at least temporarily, to the messages-in-bottles page on the Pen Pal website. I've been thinking of setting alerts in more languages than just English, so I could broaden the countries I find results from, but even just in English, it's been interesting to see just how many stories come up.

The other day, what came up was the story of Clint Buffington, a guy w...

scent portraits

I was wishing I could make a scent recording of the route from my home to the supermarket. You'd get the fresh, sweet-light scent of long grass, and then the cloying, overpowering scent of the Siberian olives in bloom, and then a whiff of creosote, as I passed a telephone pole, and then the sharp, rich smell of the mulch heaped around the bushes by the supermarket.

If I took a sound recording on the same journey, then as I walked along the boardwalk through the marsh, you'd hear--without fail-...

Timor Oan Mos Bele/We Timorese Can Do It

Doing some research, I came across this moving song, "Timor Oan Mos Bele," ("We Timorese Can Do It"), sung in Tetun, Portuguese, and English. It's addressed to everyone in Timor-Leste and urges them not to lose faith in the possibility of a good future for the country.

hatudu ba ema katak Timor oan mos bele,
labele lakon esperansa tuba rai metin
no lao ba oin nafatin

We have to show people that we Timorese can do it
We can't lose hope; we must stand firm
And continue to walk forward

The little sig...

Heroes and friends

Voices are often what pull me into a story--even before I can hear what they're saying, sometimes just their tone, their manner. That was the case with the story of Jose Armenta, a Marine who, with a German shepherd, formed a mine-detecting team of two. Terry Gross interviewed him yesterday on Fresh Air.


Jose, his wife, and their dogs (Zenit in the background). Photo credit: Adam Ferguson/National Geographic

He was so soft-spoken, so matter-of-fact. So matter-of-fact about his traumatic childho...

Salvaging the Tailor of Gloucester

A few months back I found a sad thing: a copy of Beatrix Potter's The Tailor of Gloucester frozen open in the ice on the road, and all mangled. I managed to pry the book free from the ice--minus its cover--but it was in bad shape.


But clever wakanomori realized that some of the pictures could be saved:



And when I saw that, I realized--these could be turned into cards. And so---







(There are others, but I'm only sharing the ones that I've already sent to people--no spoilers ^_^)

The story of the oars

When teenybuffalo was over the other day, she noticed these oars in our living room. "Why do you have oars next to your couch?" she asked.

Talk about a missed story opportunity! (There should be a term for this like esprit de l'escalier, a term for recognizing the perfect set-up for a story after the opportunity to tell it has passed.) I reflected on this out loud to the healing angel (we are just the two of us right now, as wakanomori has joined Little Springtime and the ninja girl in Japan....

mica and movie meme

I promised in comments to the previous entry that I'd post what the paper I made with mica looks like. Here's a sample:



And here is a beautiful chunk of rock with mica in it.



. . . And here is a May bouquet



And there's this movie meme (10 movies that are super important to you) that sartorias did, and then sovay did, and I was realizing that the movies that are most important to me are 100% foreign (60% Japanese, 10% French, 10% Danish, and 10% Icelandic)and 60% animated. Tonight, anyway.

Panda a...